Yes. And I stand by it. Read my first post again. I differentiated between allergy-du-jour and intolerance.
I never claimed that lactose intolerance was a joke. You reacted to the words “allergy-du-jour” by offering to shit on my face, as though I’d said as such, which I hadn’t.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so subtle, but other people don’t seem to have had a problem understanding what I said.
It’s clear that I’ve overreacted here, and apparently for no reason at all. Perhaps you shouldn’t have been so subtle, or perhaps I’m just being particularly dense in this thread. (In my defense, I was trying to be funny, but it seems I wasn’t at all successful.) Also, upon reading the subsequent posts, I’ve actually learned something. I had no idea that quacks were making diagnoses of lactose intolerance based on evidence other than the extreme intestinal distress that I (and people who have happened to be in proximity) am intimately familiar with.
No probs, ascenray, I was actually amused by the image. 
I’m an IBS sufferer with multiple intolerances, so I understand your discomfort.
I apologise for making a glib comment without explaining myself.
I’m gonna’ call ‘cite please’ on “as one gets older and drinks less milk”. I was a pizza and milk FIEND as a teenager and young adult, but I nonetheless developed lactose intolerance during college. I think it took me three to six years to go to the doctor about it… I didn’t have health insurance (or at least enough income for co-pays) before then.
As an aside, my wife suspects I generate none of the enzyme in question. The smallest amount of whey or milk in something I eat invariably gives me wind. I don’t know whether my alleged zero enzyme state is rare or not…
I’m going to try a couple of aged cheeses next payday. I know cheddar isn’t aged enough, but maybe a nice block of mozz. I’ll googled “aged cheese” later today.
See Post 19.
Sharp cheddar should be aged enough. Dry cheeses are usually the most aged.
Technically, the amount of milk you drink has no effect whatsoever on the amount of lactase you produce.
However, some of the symptoms of LI are created by bacteria that live in the colon and ferment undigested lactose that reaches them. Regular milk drinkers, however, tend to promote growth of bacteria that digest the lactose instead and so don’t produce the gases that create problems.* This has created the misunderstanding that milk drinking affects lactase production.
BTW, There are many, many types of cheddar. Some are considerably aged. You have to look past the Kraft blocks in the supermarket to find them, though.
*To avoid the screaming that has taken place in earlier threads, let me remind people that this is a simplified explanation for a more complicated multi-step process.
My girlfriend’s best friend is filippino, and so is one of my best friends from law school. They have no problem drinking milk, eating ice cream, eating pizza, etc. We were out eating ice cream and I noticed a lot of asians eating as well, and I brought up this little known fact about lactose intolerance that I learned here, and they all thought I was crazy. Both my friend and my gf’s friend told me that their families (they have HUGE families) have no problem eating cheese or drinking milk both here and in the Philippines (though they admit that its only recently that bottled milk is the norm as opposed to powdered milk they had before).
My gf and her friend said that when they the worked emergency room, they’d see a case every now and then, but it was always white people. After some arguing, they did not think it was a common problem in America, but did take note America isn’t the most populous nation on the planet.
And, at my company’s X-Mas party, I was talking to the head of my finance department (he’s Vietnamese), and he said that he has no problem eating ice cream or drinking milk (they had milkshakes at the party), but his wife (also Vietnamese) does. However, she doesn’t have any problems eating pizza or eating ice cream, just milk. Now that I think about it, so does my childhood Korean friend.
Is it possible/common to only have lactose intolerance to milk, and not cheese, ice cream, or any other product that has milk in it (as opposed to milk solo)?
Yep. All of these have less lactose than straight milk. And that is mixed in with a lot of other things, which makes it a bit easier on your stomach. I can eat any dairy product in normal quantities, but I avoid straight milk. I’m sure a small serving of it would be fine, but why bother? It may be that the simply never developed a taste for it, either. To me, who never drank any milk as a kid, it doesn’t seem quite like “food” and in much of Asia it has strong connotations of being children’s/babies food. It’s a lot easier to explain that I don’t drink milk than to get down in to the nitty-gritty of why.